quote:I'm not interjecting myself into your conversations. I'm not blaming mods for anything....Frankly, no offence, but I have no interest in your opinion....that's why I haven't been talking with you, and I'm sure as hell not asking you to delete anyone.....or do anything for that matter. It wouldn't matter to me if this board were completely unmoderated,

This is a PUBLIC message board FW, not a private conversation, IM or email. BTW, there is private messaging and IM available here completely unmoderated for your convenience.

As the war in Iraq moves toward a conclusion, the expectations are that the end of the war will bring at least a pause in international tensions. We do not believe this will be the case. Given U.S. war goals, crises -- inside Iraq, with nations along Iraq's border and between Europe and the United States -- can be expected to flow directly from war termination, whenever it comes. As we have said, Iraq is a campaign in a much larger war and not a war in itself. We now will see what that means.

Analysis

Stratfor has argued that the United States had two fundamental reasons for invading Iraq:

1. To transform the psychology of the Islamic world, which had perceived the United States as in essence weak and unwilling to take risks to achieve its ends.

2. To use Iraq as a strategic base of operations from which to confront Islamic regimes that are either incapable of or unwilling to deny al Qaeda and other Islamist groups access to enabling resources.

The war in Iraq is not over: There are extraordinarily complex politico-military missions to confront. This is particularly true in the north, where some substantial Iraqi forces appear to remain and where the political situation among various players -- Kurdish, Turkish, Iranian and Syrian -- remains complex, dynamic and opaque. Nevertheless, it is possible to make some assessment of the intended and unintended consequences of the war.

There already has been a strong impact on the psychology of the Arab world in particular. During the run-up to the war and until the last week, there existed a sense of growing anger and radicalization. With the collapse of resistance in Baghdad, this has given way to a sense of stunned disbelief. The Arab press appears to be filled with four themes:

1. A sense of denial, and an insistence that resistance continued but was being hidden by the world press.

2. A sense of betrayal by Saddam Hussein, whose failure to resist effectively was seen as a sign of corruption.

3. A sense of hopelessness, expressing the view that resisting the United States is beyond the capacity of Arabs. This was coupled at times with an expression of determination to rectify the situation.

4. Bitterness at Europe -- particularly France and Russia, which abandoned Iraq to its fate.

U.S. leaders understand that the result of the war will be increased bitterness, although some argue that Arab bitterness was already maxed out anyway. What they are driving for with this operation is a psychological capitulation -- a sense that accommodation with the United States is the only path.

The United States certainly has inflicted a massive blow on the Arab, if not the Islamic, psyche. The only comparable moment was in June 1967, when Israeli forces defeated the Egyptians, Syrians and Jordanians. It should be remembered that the defeat had unintended consequences: Not only did Egypt and Syria attack Israel with some effect in 1973, but the consequences of the defeat energized the Palestinian movement. The Israelis have begun warning the Palestinians to think through the lessons of Iraq. On the other side, the United States must carefully think through the lessons of 1967.

The simplistic idea that resentment of the United States will generate effective action by Arabs misses a crucial point. Two scales are at work here: the radicalism scale and the hope scale. On the radicalism scale, the level of radicalism and anti-Americanism in the Arab world has been off the chart for months. Increasing the level would be difficult. However, radicalism by itself does not lead to action. There must also be hope -- a sense that there are weaknesses in the U.S. position that can be exploited, that there is some possibility of victory, however distant. So long as the hope scale tends toward hopelessness, radicalism can be intense.

The United States was prepared to allow the radicalism scale to go deep into the danger zone, but Washington has been trying to keep the hope scale deeply in the green zone. Israel's failure after 1967 was inherent in its position: The Israelis depended heavily on outsiders for national security. The Arab perception was that the Israelis could be attacked by splitting them from their patrons. This sense of vulnerability led to an active response to defeat.

The task facing the United States now is to avoid projecting a sense of vulnerability. This is easier for Washington than it was for Israel. The United States comes out of the war less dependent on others; it also has a strong domestic consensus in favor of the war. The United States presents, at the moment, a seamless face to the Arab world: It is hated but feared. Washington now must act now to maintain the fear, while reducing hatred. How it manages Iraq will determine the outcome. If the United States loses control of the situation, it quickly could lead to a perception of vulnerability. It must control the situation in Iraq while maintaining a benign administration. This will not be as easy it sounds: Where Washington can choose between unrelenting strength and the risk of perceived weakness, it will have to carefully choose strength. That is implicit in the strategy.

From a geopolitical perspective, we already have seen the United States transiting from the Iraqi war phase toward confrontation with the surrounding states. Saudi leaders capitulated in fundamental ways before the United States went to war, permitting U.S. aircraft to fly air strikes against Iraq and allowing U.S. forces to pass through Saudi territory. Jordan and Kuwait are not problems. But there are three issues: Syria, Turkey and Iran.

* Syria: Syrian behavior has become unpredictable. The Syrians have long understood that, as a consequence of the war, their country would be surrounded by three enemies: the United States, Turkey and Israel. Rather than trying to reach an accommodation with the United States, Damascus stepped up its aggressive behavior during the war, permitting volunteers to go into Iraq to fight coalition forces and apparently permitting Iraqi personnel to seek shelter in Iraq. The Bush administration has made it clear that it finds Syrian behavior intolerable, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has refused to rule out assertive action against Syria. There was no question but that the United States was going to confront Syria at some point from its bases in Iraq, but the Syrians seem to have chosen to accelerate the process -- perhaps feeling that a better settlement could be reached earlier in the game.

* Turkey: Washington needs to defuse the bad end to the pre-war confrontation. Turkey is a geopolitical foundation of U.S. strategy -- not only in the Middle East, but also north of the Caucasus, in southeastern Europe and Iran. A permanent rift with Turkey would be intolerable. Similarly, the United States remains the foundation of Turkish national security policy. Without it, Turkey has fundamental problems. The two countries may not be friends at the moment, but they share fundamental interests. Both nations now will attempt to extract themselves from the unacceptable situation they created for each other. The key will be limiting Kurdish expectations.

* Iran: the extraordinarily complex game that Tehran is playing makes Syrian foreign policy transparent. Iran has positioned itself in such a way that its pro-Iranian Shiite groups in Iraq could wage a guerrilla war against the United States, while Tehran holds open the possibility of reaching implicit accommodations with the United States -- all at the same time. Iranian subtlety notwithstanding, Washington regards Iran as the single most potentially dangerous regime in the region, because of both its resources and the complexity of its politics and policies. Iran has positioned itself to be fundamentally unpredictable -- and having achieved this goal, it concerns the United States tremendously.

Therefore, if the goal of the United States was to create a base of operations in Iraq from which to influence the dynamics of the region internally, the game is in play even before the war is formally ended. The Syrian situation will probably be contained, but it represents a fundamentally destabilizing factor to the region. The Iranian situation is much more difficult to predict in the long run, even as the Iranians practice their traditionally complex prudence in the short run.

In a similar sense, unintended consequences of the war must be managed. The U.S. relationship with Britain is fundamental to U.S. national strategy -- and Britain, for a host of its own reasons, does not want an outright breach either with the Franco-German bloc or with multilateral organizations like the United Nations. The United States must accommodate the British without losing control of the situation in Iraq.

The primary purpose of the April 11-12 summit in St. Petersburg between Russian, German and French leaders is to find a way to limit the consequences of U.S. victory in Iraq. All of them opposed the war, and the United States prosecuted it any way. This demonstrated that Washington needs neither material support from Europe nor political validation. For all three countries, this represents a fundamental redefinition of their place in the world. There had been a fixed assumption that in some sense, the United States remained dependent on them, that they were necessary enablers for global actions. Alliance for them was not an American choice, but a necessity. Iraq represented a very public demonstration that they were irrelevant to U.S. policymaking, either individually or collectively. This represents a geopolitical crisis of the first order to them.

These countries' solution will be to try to manipulate the United States into accepting the United Nations as the primary manager of Iraqi affairs. To do so, they will use the British desire to maintain bridges to the Franco-German bloc as a means of forcing the United States to shift policy. The United States cannot abandon control of Iraq without abandoning the goals for which it fought the war. This undoubtedly will lead to another round of unpleasantness with the Euro Three, which would not bother Washington a bit. U.S. President George W. Bush is positioned domestically to take advantage of resentment -- particularly of France -- so that their demand to participate in governing Iraq will be taken as wanting the fruits of victory without taking the risks. The British, however, will be another matter. We expect to see growing strains between the two countries as Britain tries to find balance.

What we are getting at is that no postwar lull is possible here, even if there does emerge a clear-cut end to the war. The two goals of the war need immediate management. The management of Arab and Islamic public opinion requires exquisite care in the management of internal Iraqi affairs. It also requires that U.S. power in the region be perceived as irresistible. This means that U.S. relations with Syria and Iran must be managed aggressively but without crossing the line to unwarranted belligerence. It means that the U.S.-Turkish relationship must be managed dispassionately, in spite of underlying tensions. All of this is urgent. None of it will wait. Finally, the pre-war battle with the Europeans, while undoubtedly more subdued, still will define much of the global rhetoric -- save that given its stakes in the Islamic world, the United States will be even less able and less inclined to cooperate with European demands.

WASHINGTON, March 19 (UPI) -- A Pakistani nuclear missile can now hit Tel Aviv, according to a former Pakistani intelligence chief who is "strategic adviser" to his country's Islamist politico-religious parties.

Gen. Hamid Gul, the retired head of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, in his latest well-publicized (in Pakistan) statement, says, "we have the nuclear capability that can destroy Madras (India), surely the same missile can do the same to Tel Aviv. Washington cannot stop Muslim suicidal attacks. Taliban are still alive and along with "friends" they will continue the holy jihad against the U.S. America will destroy Iraq and later on repeat the same act of war against Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia."

A coalition of six extremist religious parties, MMA, now governs two of Pakistan's four provinces --- a direct result of the free elections the United States insisted be held after President Pervez Musharraf endorsed the Bush administration's war on terror.

MMA leader and newly-elected senator Sami ul-Haq has also declared jihad against the United States and Israel. "If the U.S. attacks Iraq, the MMA alliance and all their supporters will attack Washington and Tel Aviv," he said.

Another redoubtable MMA leader, Fazlur Rehman, said, for his part, "the U.S. better take seriously the consequences of its attack against Iraq because we are fully capable of taking revenge." Arguably the most powerful extremist religious leader, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, head of Jamat-e-Islamai, warned president Bush he "will suffer the horrible punishment of God."

Pakistan possesses between 35 and 60 nuclear weapons with the missile capability (obtained from North Korea) to deliver them. The nuclear arsenal is designed as a deterrent to India's older nuclear capability. India conducted its first nuclear tests in 1974. This was the first time an influential Pakistani, well known for his visceral hatred of the United States and Israel, had mentioned another nation besides India as a possible target for Pakistani nukes.

A number of Pakistani generals are Islamist fundamentalists and resent President Musharraf's close alliance with the United States. It was a "shotgun wedding," some of them have said. Musharraf had no choice when Bush called him the day after 9/11 and asked him whether he could count on him to pursue the new war against Taliban and al-Qaida. Musharraf made a quick command decision, broke with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and gave the United States the use of several bases for Operation Enduring Freedom.

The all-powerful ISI's culture has long been anti-American, dating back to 1989 when the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan and the United States began punishing Pakistan for its secret nuclear buildup. Ever since the collapse of the Taliban in November 2001, ISI officers have spread the word among the tribal chiefs along their ill-defined Pakistani-Afghan border that "America will be coming after Pakistan's nuclear arsenal as soon as they have finished with Afghanistan."

How safe is Pakistan's nuclear arsenal? Shortly after 9/11, Musharraf ordered the country's nuclear weapons to be detached from their launchers and stored in six different secret locations with fail-safe security systems. But Musharraf has survived six assassination plots since 9/11 and the CIA is clearly concerned about the very real possibility that an Islamist general could take over one day --- and acquire control of the arsenal.

Pakistan has carefully refrained from signing the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. Nor is it committed to the non-first use doctrine. India and Pakistan pulled back last summer from a face-off between 1 million troops. There is little doubt if India were to humiliate Pakistan militarily over the long-standing Kashmir dispute, Pakistan would retaliate with a nuclear salvo. Senior Indian national security officials accept this possibility with equanimity. In fact, one of them, speaking privately a month ago, said, "we could easily survive one or two nuclear hits, but when we retaliate Pakistan would disappear from the map."

The North Korean crisis has been adjudged by Secretary of State Colin Powell as "not a crisis." Pakistan, in that perspective, is even less of a crisis.

posted 04-12-2003 11:44 AM
I was watching the Bill Maher show, and Arriana Huffington (one of his typical liberal guests) was now complaining that we've got the Arab world scared that they might be next....as well they should be. Well…yeah…that’s kinda the point. Well this is exactly the desired objective. Syria, for example knows that they are probably next on the s-list...and Bush has good reason; they harbor terrorists, maybe even Hussein's family in exile. They've taken possession of some of Saddam's WMDs before the war started. They've been committing acts of war by sending over people to fight against America in this war.

Syria is probably next....The message is loud and clear to the "axis of evil". You might be next. This is a deterrent....Liberals just don't get how deterrence works for some reason. If they try anything out of panic, like attacking us, it gives Bush all the excuse he needs to wipe them out, and one more terrorist country is taken down….one more population is liberated. This is a good thing.

And Kook, I’m only addressing you publicly because you addressed me…If I have no desire to talk with you publicly (as I’ve said)…then why would I want to talk with you privately?

Let's talk war crimes. Yes, I know about the war crimes of Saddam. He slaughtered the innocent, gassed the Kurds, tortured his people and – though it is true we remained good friends with this butcher for more than half of his horrible career – could be held responsible for killing up to a million people, the death toll of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. But while we are congratulating ourselves on the "liberation" of Baghdad, an event that is fast turning into a nightmare for many of its residents, it is as good a time as any to recall how we've been conducting this ideological war.

So let's start with the end – with the Gone With The Wind epic of looting and anarchy with which the Iraqi population have chosen to celebrate our gift to them of "liberation" and "democracy". It started in Basra, of course, with our own shameful British response to the orgy of theft that took hold of the city. Our defence minister, Geoff Hoon, made some especially childish remarks about this disgraceful state of affairs, suggesting in the House of Commons that the people of Basra were merely "liberating" – that word again – their property from the Baath party. And the British Army enthusiastically endorsed this nonsense.

Even as tape of the pillage in Basra was being beamed around the world, there was Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Blackman of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards cheerfully telling the BBC that "it' s absolutely not my business to get in the way." But of course it is Colonel Blackman's business to "get in the way". Pillage merits a specific prevention clause in the Geneva Conventions, just as it did in the 1907 Hague Convention upon which the Geneva delegates based their "rules of war". "Pillage is prohibited," the 1949 Geneva Conventions say, and Colonel Blackman and Mr Hoon should glance at Crimes of War, published in conjunction with the City University Journalism Department – page 276 is the most dramatic – to understand what this means.

When an occupying power takes over another country' s territory, it automatically becomes responsible for the protection of its civilians, their property and institutions. Thus the American troops in Nasiriyah became automatically responsible for the driver who was murdered for his car in the first day of that city's "liberation". The Americans in Baghdad were responsible for the German and Slovak embassies that were looted by hundreds of Iraqis on Thursday, and for the French Cultural Centre, which was attacked, and for the Central Bank of Iraq, which was torched yesterday afternoon.

But the British and Americans have simply discarded this notion, based though it is upon conventions and international law. And we journalists have allowed them to do so. We clapped our hands like children when the Americans "assisted" the Iraqis in bringing down the statue of Saddam Hussein in front of the television cameras this week, and yet we went on talking about the "liberation" of Baghdad as if the majority of civilians there were garlanding the soldiers with flowers instead of queuing with anxiety at checkpoints and watching the looting of their capital.

We journalists have been co-operating, too, with a further collapse of morality in this war. Take, for example, the ruthless bombing of the residential Mansur area of Baghdad last week. The Anglo-American armies – or the "coalition", as the BBC still stubbornly and mendaciously calls the invaders – claimed they believed that Saddam and his two evil sons Qusay and Uday were present there. So they bombed the civilians of Mansur and killed at least 14 decent, innocent people, almost all of them – and this would obviously be of interest to the religious feelings of Messrs Bush and Blair – Christians.

Now one might have expected the BBC World Service Radio next morning to question whether the bombing of civilians did not constitute a bit of an immoral act, a war crime perhaps, however much we wanted to kill Saddam. Forget it. The presenter in London described the slaughter of these innocent civilians as "a new twist" in the war to target Saddam – as if it was quite in order to kill civilians, knowingly and in cold blood, in order to murder our most hated tyrant. The BBC's correspondent in Qatar – where the Centcom boys pompously boasted that they had "real-time" intelligence (subsequently proved to be untrue) that Saddam was present – used all the usual military jargon to justify the unjustifiable. The "coalition", he announced, knew it had "time-sensitive material" – ie that they wouldn't have time to know whether they were killing innocent human beings in the furtherance of their cause or not – and that this "actionable material" (again I quote this revolting BBC dispatch) was not "risk-free".

And then he went on to describe, without a moment of reflection, on the moral issues involved, how the Americans had used four 2,000lb "bunker-buster bombs to level the civilian homes". These are, of course, the very same pieces of ordnance that the same US air force used in their vain effort to kill Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains. So now we use them, knowingly, on the flimsy homes of civilians of Baghdad – folk who would otherwise be worthy of the "liberation" we wished to bestow upon them – in the hope that a gamble, a bit of faulty "intelligence" about Saddam, will pay off.

The Geneva Conventions have a lot to say about all this. They specifically refer to civilians as protected persons, as persons who must have the protection of a warring power even if they find themselves in the presence of armed antagonists. The same protection was demanded for southern Lebanese civilians when Israel launched its brutal "Grapes of Wrath" operation in 1996. When an Israeli pilot, for example, fired a US-made Hellfire missile into an ambulance, killing three children and two women, the Israelis claimed that a Hezbollah fighter had been in the same vehicle. The statement proved to be totally untrue. But Israel was rightly condemned for killing civilians in the hope of killing an enemy combatant. Now we are doing exactly the same. And Ariel Sharon must be pleased. No more namby-pamby western criticism of Israel after the bunker-busters have been dropped on Mansur.

More and more, we are committing these crimes. The mass slaughter of more than 400 civilians in the Amariyah air raid shelter in Baghdad in the 1991 Gulf War was carried out in the hope that it would kill Saddam. Why? Why cannot we abide by the rules of war we rightly demand that others should obey? Why do we journalists – yet again, war after war – connive in this immorality by turning a ruthless and cruel and illegal act into a "new twist" or into "time-sensitive material"?

Wars have a habit of turning normally sane people into cheerleaders, of transforming rational journalists into nasty little puffed-up fantasy colonels. But surely we should all carry the Geneva Conventions into war with us, along with that little book from the City University. For the only people to benefit from our own war crimes will be the next generation of Saddam Husseins.

Veteran foreign-service officer Barbara Bodine's appointment as a key player in Iraq's transitional government has angered Defense Department officials and federal law-enforcement authorities who believe that as U.S. ambassador to Yemen, she blocked an FBI investigation into the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.Top Stories

Working through a number of channels, including the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the Senate, several high-ranking federal authorities are calling on President Bush to rescind the appointment. Miss Bodine, a "diplomat in residence" at the University of California at Santa Barbara, was named last month by Mr. Bush as director of relief and reconstruction for central Iraq, based in Baghdad. She served in Baghdad during Saddam Hussein's regime, later in Kuwait and then Yemen, where she was ambassador from 1997 to 2001. After the Oct. 12, 2000, suicide bombing of the Cole, which killed 17 U.S. sailors and injured 35 others, she served as chief negotiator between the U.S. and Yemeni governments. "The State Department has successfully imposed Barbara Bodine on the Defense Department team dealing with a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq," said one former high-ranking Senate official close to the Pentagon. "She is to be the mayor of Baghdad, in essence. The Defense Department is livid, but there seems nothing they can do." A Pentagon official, who asked not to be identified, said Miss Bodine dismissed warnings of terrorist attacks in Yemen against U.S. ships and allowed the Cole to enter port at a reduced security level because she felt the value of showing a U.S. presence in Yemen outweighed the risks. "But she's never said she was sorry or that she made a mistake," said the official. FBI executives and agents familiar with the Cole probe said Miss Bodine, as ambassador in Yemen, prevented the bureau from advancing its investigation into the bombing at a time when agents were beginning to focus on Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden. The bureau's top terrorist hunter, John O'Neill, headed the Cole probe and was laying the groundwork for a conspiracy case against al Qaeda more than a year before the September 11 attacks. He had been sent by FBI Director Louis J. Freeh to Yemen with a force of 100 agents, laboratory experts and forensics specialists. But FBI officials said the Cole investigation was stymied by Miss Bodine and that she made little effort to encourage Yemeni authorities to cooperate. Despite a number of death threats against agents by Islamic terrorists, she refused to allow investigators to carry the weapons Mr. O'Neill considered necessary for their protection. After Mr. O'Neill left Yemen in August 2001 for New York, Miss Bodine refused to authorize his re-entry visa back into Yemen. His colleagues said he was told by Miss Bodine his investigative techniques were too aggressive and undiplomatic, and it was important for the United States to get along with foreign governments. FBI officials and others familiar with the Cole probe said Mr. O'Neill believed it was important to show the Yemeni security force the FBI meant business in the Cole inquiry. Once he was denied re-entry, however, they said what little cooperation investigators had seen from Yemeni authorities disappeared. Now traveling from Kuwait to Iraq with other transition-team members, Miss Bodine was unavailable yesterday for comment. Mr. O'Neill retired two weeks before the September 11 attacks, telling colleagues the government hindered the Cole probe because it was getting too close to several foreign dignitaries. On Sept. 3, 2001, he took a job as chief of security at the World Trade Center, where he died with thousands of others eight days later. "There's no doubt that denying O'Neill access to Yemen significantly limited the Cole investigation, perhaps even killing it" said one key FBI official. "And that decision was made by Ambassador Bodine." Mr. O'Neill headed the team that captured Ramzi Yousef in Pakistan in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and led the probe into the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa that resulted in an indictment of bin Laden and 16 al Qaeda associates. Miss Bodine has spent her career working primarily in southwest Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. She served as deputy principal officer in Baghdad and deputy chief of mission in Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion and occupation in 1990.

Marines discover huge cache of suicide bomb vests in a schoolBy Ravi Nessman, Associated Press, 4/12/2003 03:15BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) U.S. marines have found an enormous cache of suicide bomb vests in an elementary school in central Baghdad. On the floor of the science classroom with a picture of Saddam Hussein on the green chalk board there lay nearly 50 black leather vests each packed with C4 explosives and ball bearings.

In a middle school less than 500 feet away Saturday, Marines displayed hundreds of crates filled with rocket propelled grenade launchers, surface to air missiles, shoulder launched rockets and ammunition.

In the first school, less than 20 feet from the nearest home, the suicide vests nearly covered the floor, sealed in plastic and still on hangers. Each powerful bomb weighed at least 20 pounds and was lined with long rectangular blocks of C4 explosives and hundreds of ball bearings. Wires ran through them.

''They were indeed dedicated to do something if they strapped on that vest,'' said Marine Lt. David Wright, 27, of Goldsboro, N.C. He worried that a few hangers were empty and some of the vests might have gone missing. ''Odds are high that someone is out there wearing one,'' he said.

In the school's courtyard, Marines found cardboard boxes filled with detonators with two red switches on one side and Velcro on the other. They also found a roll of red detonation chord, three boxes of dynamite, a crate of electrical chords in a box marked explosives, and stacks of empty hangers.

Nearby, they discovered stacks of plastic bags filled with blocks of reddish brown putty that the Marines said could be explosives.

In the middle school, crates of weapons and ammunition filled seven classrooms. Some of the boxes were marked: ''GHQ Jordan Armed Forces Director of Planning and Organization, Amman, Jordan.'' Mortars were packed in brown paper bags.

In one room, a drawing of Tweety Bird hung on the wall above empty metal boxes for Kalashnikov ammunition. On the school's exterior walls, children had painted blue and brown butterflies, flowers and boats sailing on water.

Marines said they surrounded the school as they searched through the middle-class neighborhood dotted with verandahs and palm trees. Residents told them that Iraqi soldiers and Fedayeen fighters had placed dozens of RPGs and shoulder launched rockets in their yards.

Those items also were collected and put in a separate pile in the school yard. Artillery pieces and anti-aircraft guns also were found.

Residents said that two days before the bombing started in Baghdad, four trucks of soldiers and Fedayeen arrived at each school and began unloading crates. After coalition planes bombed the Fedayeen headquarters, about 40 or 50 armed men moved into the neighborhood, camping in a nearby lot. They left about a week ago after setting a small fire at one of the schools, possibly to burn documents, residents said.

''It worries us. We have children. We have families. What are we supposed to do?'' said 54-year-old Farouk al Anary.

Residents who went into the school to put out the fire discovered the suicide vests and dumped sand on them to lessen the risk of an explosion.

U.S. troops in Iraq have been on high alert against suicide attacks.

Followers of al-Qaida and other radical Islamic groups calling for a holy war have used the fighting in Iraq to recruit and reconnect with like-minded warriors committed to attacks on Americans. Volunteer fighters from other Arab countries reportedly have moved into Iraq in sizable numbers.

U.S. soldiers killed six Iraqi fighters wearing the head bands and clothes of Islamic suicide attackers Sunday on the southern outskirts of Baghdad.

The week before, two Iraqi women blew themselves up in an attack on U.S. forces, killing three American soldiers in western Iraq.

In the first suicide attack against American forces early in the war, a bomber posing as a taxi driver pulled up to a roadblock north of Najaf, waved to American troops for help, then blew up his vehicle up as they approached, killing four. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein rewarded the attacker with a posthumous military promotion, two medals and a financial reward for his family.

On Friday, a car carrying an Iraqi family drove through a checkpoint in Baghdad without stopping, and Marines opened fire fearing a possible suicide attack. Three adults were killed, and a 5-year-old girl was wounded.

The night before, a vehicle containing explosives was driven to a checkpoint near the Saddam City section of Baghdad and detonated. Four Marines and one medical corpsman were wounded.

Radical Palestinians fighting for statehood have killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombing in the past 30 months. Palestinians have been strong backers of Saddam in the current war with the U.S.-led coalition and backed him as well in the 1991 Gulf War.

Saddam has paid thousands of dollars to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers as an incentive to attack Israelis.

WASHINGTON, April 10 — The Pentagon contract given without competition to a Halliburton subsidiary to fight oil well fires in Iraq is worth as much as $7 billion over two years, according to a letter from the Army Corps of Engineers that was released today.

The contract also allows Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary, to earn as much as 7 percent profit. That could amount to $490 million.

The corps released these new details in a letter to Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and one of the two senior lawmakers who asked the General Accounting Office to investigate how the Bush administration is awarding contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq.Advertisement

The reconstruction effort could cost up to $100 billion and become one of the most lucrative building programs in decades.

The contract to Kellogg Brown & Root was cited in the lawmakers' request to the G.A.O., the investigative arm of Congress. Mr. Waxman and Representative John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, asked that special attention be paid to "allegations that Halliburton has received special treatment from the administration."

Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive from 1995 until 2000. When he left the company to run for vice president, Mr. Cheney received over $30 million in compensation, Mr. Waxman said.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, Kellogg Brown & Root has won significant additional business from the federal government and the Pentagon. It has built cells for detainees at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and is the exclusive logistics supplier for the Navy and the Army, providing services like cooking, construction, power generation and fuel transportation.

Since the war with Iraq began, Mr. Cheney has been repeatedly questioned about his ties to his old employer and the oil industry.

But the administration said that these contracts and all other contracts to rebuild Iraq were awarded without any comment from Mr. Cheney or anyone else in the White House.

"The White House has no role in selecting individual contractors," said Michael Anton, spokesman for the National Security Council.

Lt. Gen. Robert B. Flowers, the commander of the Corps of Engineers, wrote in his letter that Kellogg Brown & Root was chosen because it was the only contractor considered capable of developing what he called "complex, classified contingency plans" and then to carry them out "on extremely short notice."

"No other contractor could satisfy mission requirements in the time available," General Flowers wrote.

He also said that the Defense Department could not follow public procedures for awarding the contract, including a public notice, because the war plans and the need to fight oil fires in Iraq were then classified information. In the future, however, General Flowers promised "ample opportunity for competition" to restore Iraq's oil infrastructure.

The most sought-after contract will be awarded by the United States Agency for International Development and will cover the initial work to rebuild Iraq's roads, water and power systems, schools and hospitals. Bidding was restricted to five American companies for the same reasons that Kellogg Brown & Root won its contract without any competition: the need for speed and for security clearances.

But government contract experts say that those needs have been exaggerated and that they may be violations of international trade agreements as well as federal rules.

Mr. Waxman responded to the letter from General Flowers with several new questions.

While accepting that the administration may have had valid reasons for giving the two-year contract to Kellogg Brown & Root for emergency work during the war, Mr. Waxman wrote, "It is harder to understand, however, what the rationale would be for a sole-source contract that has a multiyear duration and a multibillion-dollar price tag."

He asked General Flowers in a letter today how the Army determined the cost of the work to be done by Kellogg Brown & Root and when the Army would replace the current contract with one up for competition.

CNN, Fox and the other CIA based LieNews organizations continue the deception by ceasing to show images of the ensuing battles, bombings, bloodied kids, and infernos still raging on in Iraq - Just happy people hugging pictures of George Bush. Guess where these underprivileged Iraqis got their commemorative George Bush posters... That's right, from the same CIA psy-op group who is orchestrating this latest twist on an old idea. An idea fully embraced by the human lizard Donald Rumsfeld - The idea that you can conquer the world with the big “fake out.” In Rumsfeld’s wet dream, he conquers the world by severely bullshitting them. The New World Order types like Rumsfeld believe that they can control all the humans especially the Americans with the scientific application of bogusness, lies, disinformation, fakeness, fraudulence, dizzying insider oil and arms deals, war profiteering, and a healthy splattering of bloodied kids, women and a generation of this or that countries’ young men. It’s a lie. And it’s not the America I remember. And it’s not the kind of country I want to see us transformed into permanently.

The word came down from the top - NO MORE BATTLE IMAGES. That would send out a confusing message since the TV already showed jubilant Iraqis tearing down statues. JUST HAPPY SMILING IRAQIS. But wait a second, some of the most bloodiest bombing and fighting is going on right this second while we see the loops over and over again of Iraqis throwing garlands of flowers on our troops, what gives?

Right now the US media is a complete and total element of the US government and in particular the Bush administration. Right now, out of the peering eye of the TV cameras rages the bloodiest phase of this bloody filthy war for oil profits - total indiscriminate killing in the outer cities to affect an immediate way out of the quickly building QUAGMIRE.

The Administration had a VERY SHORT LIVED, “I TOLD YOU SO.” The reality is starting to leak out about what really happened there and what is continuing to happen there - They are “Liberating” (disfiguring or killing) thousands of little kids today, right now, after the liberation.

And since the CIA decided that you can only control people if you can successfully oppress the truth, their news service, CNN, will no longer even bring you ANY pictures of the reality of war. The lying agenda has shifted to the new lie which is how wonderful the Iraqi people think their new conquerors are. So VOXnews will bring you the real pictures about what is really going on.

At the head of tens of thousands of anti-war protesters, three-and-a-half-year-old Dora sits in her pram. On her knees rests a cartoon: (George W.) "Bush you bastard" is crayoned underneath a doodle of the US president's head.

Behind the pram are her parents Elaine and Julian Smith. The couple have marched past Westminster Palace and are on their way to picnic with their family in Hyde Park where a rally awaits.

"She's been with us for all the three big demonstrations. She's happy I think," says Elaine, smiling before striding out to avoid being enveloped by the throng behind.

On February 15, more than one million people took to the streets of London to protest the then looming war on Baghdad in what police said was one of the largest demonstrations ever in the British capital.

On March 22, two days after the start of hostilities, between 200,000 and 700,000 people protested here.

At the sides of the road, Japanese tourists notice the trio and appear bemused.

The Japanese block their ears and squeeze up against a hotel to avoid being swept along as the procession winds it way through central London.

It is very loud.

Drums, hooters, the shouting of slogans by the demonstrators make it impossible to hear anything above the cacophony.

Behind placards reading: "No occupation, No War," are some of the march's protagonists: Ken Loach, the socialist English film director, Jeremy Corbyn from British Prime Minister Tony Blair's ruling Labour party.

Alongside them are members of the Stop the War Coalition who organised the march, moving at a good pace despite holding a banner.

Cameramen shoulder each other to get the best vantage point to shoot their film.

A group of students stop outside Downing Street, Blair's official residence, to lay down wreaths and flowers in memory of the women, the children and all the civilians who have lost their lives during the conflict.

"It is important we keep telling people it is not in our name. This is war for big US corporations," Loach blasts, refering to the US and British occupation of Iraq.

Demonstrators wave multi-coloured banners and flags including those of many Muslim countries. Palestinian and Iraqi flags are the most conspicuous.

There are also peace flags, Pakistani flags, Kashmiri flags and those of all the political organisations taking part in the march.

People are chanting: "We all live in a terrorist regime," to the tune of the Beatles hit "Yellow Submarine."

The march comes to an end in the abundant greenery of Hyde Park, a wooded and peaceful sanctuary in the heart of London, where the organisers intend to address the masses.

On the grass a large Pakistani family are having a picnic.

"I don't think it was worth killing so many people. This is only a war for oil," says Balqees Hamed sitting amongst her seven brothers and sisters and her father.

Mariam Termizi, a 20-year-old Malaysian law student from Kuala Lumpur, appreciates having the freedom to protest in such a peaceful atmoshphere.

Dressed modestly and wearing a headscarf to hide her hair she expresses her surprise at the behaviour of the British police who she describes as nice and in control of the situation.

Bob Cottingham, an 81-year-old pensioner, is wearing a placard as a vest which says: "bilions for bombs, peanuts for pensions."

This World War II veteran who has been decorated several times for his military valour, is now an anti-war activist who says he doesn't miss a single demonstration.

"I've done the war, I've got the medals. None of us supported Saddam Hussein," he says.

posted 04-13-2003 08:02 AM
Mech is just a whiner and sore looser who can’t admit when he’s obviously wrong. This was one of the most brilliantly planned and executed wars in the human history of warfare. Least civilians killed (by us) than any other war. Lowest US casualties than any other war. Fastest regime change, than any other war. A demon from hell was removed from power. An unbelievably powerful message was sent to the Arab world as a detterrent to further terrorism. WMDs are being found, and production of WMDs are being prevented….so that an insane demon (Saddam Hussein) does not possess them. What’s not to like?

This is one of the greatest success stories I’ve ever seen. I’m proud to be an American today, and I feel great security in the fact that the world knows that we are not a paper tiger (as it began to believe when we were under the reign of horror of the weak and incompetent traitorous sellout of the Clinton administration). Here's some good news to counter Mech’s anti-America propaganda ;

An Iraqi tipped off the Marines who were near Samarra and were closing in on Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), that they would shortly "come in contact with a number of Americans," Franks told Fox News.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," said two of the Americans have gunshot wounds.

The families of the seven are being notified, Rumsfeld said.

Ronald Young Sr. identified one of the Americans in shaky video shown by CNN as his son, Chief Warrant Officer Ronald D. Young Jr., who was listed as a POW after his Apache helicopter was forced down March 23.

"It's him, and I'm just so happy that I could kiss the world!" the elder Young said, adding that he had not been contacted by the military. "It's him! It's definitely him."

Franks said that he believed the Marines "picked them up on the road."

"I know they're in good shape and I know they're in our hands and under our control now," he told CNN.

Franks said he was unsure whether the group was among five listed as missing or seven listed as POWs.

Franks originally said six were found. Central Command later said seven Americans were safe.

Bob Franken of CNN, who was with the Marine 24th Expeditionary Unit, said the Americans were brought to an airfield about 50 miles south of Baghdad in ambulances and all ran or walked to a C-130 transport plane to take them to Kuwait.

Two walked with a limp and one of those was a woman, Franken said.

One of the seven raised his hand in victory, and the woman was carrying her own equipment, he said. Marines nearby applauded as they went past, he said.

Pentagon (news - web sites) officials have committed to tracking down 12 soldiers still missing or captured since the spectacular rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch on April 1, but until Franks' revelation, there appeared to be no leads.

Franks said he was reluctant to discuss the matter further until he had better information — but he made sure to underscore once again his commitment to rescuing coalition captives.

"For sure we're going to take care of our own," he told CNN. "This is very good news."

The sister-in-law of Army Spc. Joseph Hudson, a 23-year-old POW who was among the 507th Maintenance Company soldiers shown on Iraqi TV, was optimistic Sunday when she heard some of the troops had been freed.

"I hope it's Joe," Bethany Herrera said.

Elsie Morgan, a spokeswoman for relatives of Army Spc. Shoshana Johnson, 30, of El Paso, Texas, said the family was "waiting for confirmation" from the military.

Officials had been sounding an upbeat note in recent days, saying more people were willing to talk and share secrets about potential POW sightings now that Saddam Hussein's henchmen are gone.

"What we're finding now is that the regime has been moved away, people will speak about what it is they know," U.S. Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks at U.S. Central Command in Doha, Qatar said Saturday during a briefing. "And so, we suspect that much of the information that will assist us either in finding prisoners of war from this conflict or previous conflicts ... will come by way of the elimination of the regime."

Lynch, who was rescued April 1 from a hospital in the southern city of Nasiriyah after an Iraqi civilian tipped soldiers off, became the first POW to return home Saturday.

The United States lists five other soldiers as missing and seven as prisoners of war.

posted 04-13-2003 08:46 AM
Nice STATE SPONSORED propaganda you have their Fastwalker.

I'm sure it will pull on the heartstrings of most Americans.

FW:--"Mech is just a whiner and sore looser who can’t admit when he’s obviously wrong."

No...not quite bro. Definately NOT wrong. Killing to make the likes of Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel, and Shell Oil even richer doesn't put you on the "Winning" side as far as I am concerned.

Bu$h never would have invaded if there wasn't oil to be had or a strategic gain.

Bu$h could give a rats @$$ about those people. He would never raise a finger to help a country like say...Sudan..where some people are actually still slaves and WORSE things happen to them than in Saddam's regime...NO...No OIL there so screw em'.Can't dominate the middle east from that location either.

Yep...happy to be buddy-buddy with a less-than-trusting country like Pakistan..whose majority of people actually hate us for what we did in Afganistan.A country that beheads people for stealing. A country with an unstable government and Nukes pointing at India.

Happy to do buisness with a murderous fascist Country like China..where many political dissidents are doing time in forced labor camps for criticizing their government.Lots of torture too. Just walk into any Wal-Mart.Plenty of near-slave-wage Chinese products for decedant, unsuspecting American people. Oh yes, can you smell the HYPOCRICY?

No..I refuse to put my faith in a government who only caters to a small hand of greedy globalists who start wars for profit.Selling us out. No thanks. Not in my America.

All the American firms to get Iraqi reconstruction contracts have bankrolled George Bush and the Republican Party or have direct links to USAID, the department of state handing out the Iraqi contracts. All the contracts are being negotiated in secret - in the interests of national security - and all the contracts will go to US firms. British firms are only allowed to bid for sub-contracted work. Yesterday, the US senate approved a $80 billion package to finance the war in iraq and its reconstruction.

International Resources Group, which made significant donations to the Republican party, has won the $70 million (£44m) contract to establish the humanitarian aid programme in Iraq. Four of IRG's vice presidents have held senior posts with the US government's United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and 24 of the firm's 48 technical staff have worked for USAID.

John Hemingway, the president of SteveDoring Services of America, which won the Iraqi reconstruction contract to manage the port of Umm Qasr, has made personal donations to the Republican party. SSA was the first firm to received a contract. It was worth $4.8m.

Other companies in the running for contracts include the Bechtel Group, bidding to secure contracts worth up to $900m. According to the Federal Election Commission, Bechtel handed over almost $770,000 to the Republicans between 1999 and March 2003 .

Donald Rumsfeld once acted as a liaison between Bechtel and the Iraqi regime in a bid to finesse the building of an oil pipeline.

Washington Group International Inc, bidding for the capital construction job, gave $438,700 to the Republicans -- on top of a donation to Bush -- and the Louis Berger Group gave $26,300 to the Republicans.

Since 1999, the oil giant once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, Halliburton, has given $700,000 or 95% of its political donations to the Republican party. Its subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, was the first company to win an Iraqi reconstruction contract. The deal is reportedly worth $500m.

Also in the running for contracts are Fluor Corp, which donated $275,000 to the Republicans and has ties to a number of intelligence and defence procurement officials.

If we attack Syria or Iran next, will it be because they have oil, or will it be because they harbor and fund terrorist organizations? (Mech may not even realize he just destroyed his whole theory here).

If you say attacking Syria or Iran is about a terrorist threat they pose (using WMDs or not), then wouldn't you have to change your thesis that this war is about oil? Seems to me, all indications are consistent with the stated mission GW outlined regarding this war on terrorism and…... I've already shown why the oil argument is ridiculous....

If we attack Syria and Iran, the oil argument is moot , don't ya think? I mean if you are to be intellectually honest and consistent in your reasoning….(which I don’t expect to happen any time soon)

But maybe we should re-examine and focus the blood for oil argument because it seems central to your main argument. It seems to me that my previous explanation, as to why this argument is ridiculous, fell on your deaf eyes. You keep going back to these unqualified statements without addressing the argument or the reasoning you‘ve used to arrive at your conclusions. So let's focus on this subject first....Maybe I could even begin another thread completely dedicated to de-bunking the blood for oil argument.

Firstly, tell me Mech, how do you think these companies you mention will profit from Iraqi oil? Did you understand my explanation to you as to how oil will be sold on the world Markets? Obviously you don’t seem to have any concept of this…but I don’t want to put words in your keyboard. Show me why I’m wrong here.

If you can understand why the foundation of your argument is ridiculous (a daunting task to make Mech understand anything...I know), then you must be intellectually honest with yourself and realize that the rest of your assumptions that are based on that faulty premise are also ridiculous and erroneous. So let's focus.....on this one argument..“oil for blood“. How will this war and spending next to 100 billion, help these oil companies, when Iraqi oil will be sold to the world markets and all proceeds will go to the re-building of Iraq and the Iraqi people. How do these oil companies profit from this Mech?

It's a very specific question, I know, but surely you know exactly how these companies profit, because you are the one making the statement and all further assumptions based upon that statement. Your thesis is that this war is about oil, not stopping terrorism (when it should be perfectly obvious to every thinking person at this point that stopping terrorism is the goal). You say it's about oil...so make your case. Don't use the words of others. I refuse to read your propaganda links. I want to see in your own words how this war is about oil and how it profits oil companies. What is the mechanism by which this profit will occur? Personally, it seems to me, oil companies will loose money by this venture....especially since all profits of production are going back into the Iraqi economy. Prove me wrong Mech. Why am I wrong? How will oil companies profit, as you say?

I'm waiting for a straightforward answer here.

Next we'll move onto how you can still make this ridiculous "oil for blood" argument if we attack Syria and Iran.

Personally, I don't think we'll need to do anything as massive in Iran or Syria, because the war in Iraq was enough of an attention getter. It was a detterrent (as I keep saying) but you dismiss the concept of deterrence altogether. We may drop a few bombs in chosen targets in those countries to further give them a reminder that we are not fooling around on this war with terrorism… I don't rule that out at all.... But I don’t think we’ll go to all-out war with these countries. It depends on their aggression and their response to diplomacy in the near future, I suppose.

But certainly, the "it's all about oil" argument goes at the window at that point...if we do attack.

Do you have trouble reading Fastwalker? Surely you must not have read anything I posted in this thread.

Lets try it again..

"All the American firms to get Iraqi reconstruction contracts have bankrolled George Bush and the Republican Party or have direct links to USAID, the department of state handing out the Iraqi contracts. All the contracts are being negotiated IN SECRET - in the interests of "national security" - and all the contracts will go to US firms."

This story finely illustrates the continuing agenda of the Bush Regime. It has not stopped at Iraq. Its thirst for blood and oil has not been quenched. Richard Perle is spitting out the exact same firing pattern of black speech the Bush Regime has already used twice to pre-emptively attack and destroy other nations.

Perle's contemptuous words of are more than enough to confirm that Damascus falls next.

How many times will we let them get away with this before enough of us wake up to stop them? How many more thousands of deaths does it take to establish an obvious, proven pattern of murderous imperial violence?

We are all guilty of their deeds until we rise and crush the Amerikan Regime that has infiltrated and taken over our system of government.

Words cannot stop them. The small numbers of the Awakened, those who understand what's going on all around us, are not enough to stop them. We MUST save America from this Insurrection! But without the vast majority of Americans comprehending what's happening, we'll remain impotent to do anything about Amerika's Totalitarian, goose-stepping march across the globe...

THE REST OF US MUST AWAKEN!!!

For the love of America, awaken to the blood, the atrocity, the cold-blooded, remote-controlled mass murder committed in YOUR NAMES and in the names of the victims of September 11th, who were NOT attacked by anyone we've so far MURDERED!

Awaken to the strings attached to our Congressmen, to our Media, to your own Mind! Stop swallowing the putrid miasma of lies they call justification and THINK FOR YOURSELVES!

Awaken to the propaganda war being aimed at YOU, to keep your mind malleable and fertile for any excuse they wish to have you believe, or any doctrine they wish you to adopt!

Awaken to the reality of the Bush Regime's goals, and the actions they've already SUCCESSFULLY taken to shred your Constitutional Rights, all in the name of September 11th, which remains uninvestigated to this day! The evidence already gathered by the people destroys the government story and implicates them in 3,000 counts of premeditated MURDER. And it was murder for the sake of manipulation and repression... of Americans!

We're being shoved like prisoners of war along a dusty path to Total Control of the people by the State, and it still ASTONISHES me and ANGERS me beyond all belief how many of us still ACCEPT IT and even DEFEND IT!!!

Two years ago we would have seen this pattern long before now and been OUTRAGED. The media would have had a field day with the SCANDAL of the Millennium! And here we are, slumped over with glazed expressions, breathing through our mouths as we gaze at ABCNNBCBS feeding us their specially pureed pablum of war events, wrapped up in a crispy, flaky crust and presented with a patriot garnish as ENTERTAINMENT!!!

And we SWALLOW IT like STARVING CHILDREN!!!!

I still don't understand why we haven't outlawed off-switches on televisions? Wouldn't that be the next logical necessity for population self-control? That way we can still hear it in the livingroom when we go to bed, and let the music of Fascism dance through our heads.

WE ARE BEING USED, FOOLS!!!!!!! Our blood is the grease of Empire, and we're giving it away to the Bush Regime in gallons daily, like we might give a monthly pint to the Red Cross.

WE ARE NOW THE ENEMY, PEOPLE! For the love of all that was once good and beautiful about America, WAKE UP and help us FIGHT this ENTROPY OF CIVILIZATION!!!!!

And if not, then damn you to hell for your criminal ignorance! For we shall all burn along with Rome as you continue to slumber on the way to our permanent subjugation.

"The Department of Veterans Affairs is being targeted for billions in cuts. Evidently, President Bush's support for the troops doesn't include their health care."

... "The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive the veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation." — President George Washington

War was his best moment and his worst. Visions of whistling bullets, airborne body parts, screams of the wounded—and that was a good day for Joe Hooper. The Medal of Honor winner and most decorated soldier in Vietnam would bolt upward in his Seattle bed, sweating booze from the night before. Those earlier appearances on national TV, the possibility of a Hollywood biopic, hanging out with Bob Hope and several presidents—that just churned him up more inside. The catlike, strawberry-haired 6-footer and former Washington state football scoring champ at Moses Lake High School had enlisted at age 19 because he admired the military.

Then came Vietnam. Staff Sgt. Joe Hooper, 29, of the 501st Airborne Infantry, killed at least 115 of the enemy—24 of them in a six-hour firefight, lobbing grenades into Viet Cong bunkers and wading through withering machine-gun fire to repeatedly rescue wounded American soldiers. Fourteen out of 189 survived. After treatment for his wounds, Hooper broke out of the hospital to return to his unit. Part American Indian, he said he could “smell out” the enemy, and thought he was born to go to Vietnam. His 37 medals were more than those earned by World War II’s Audie Murphy and World War I’s Alvin York—names that, unlike Hooper’s, still ring familiar today. Like others of his era, he arrived home to accusations of being a baby killer. But that’s not what eventually soured him on Vietnam. “At high schools, when I speak, the question kids most often asked me was, ‘Would you do it again?’” he told me once. “I would, the reason being I thought my abilities helped save lives. But I would tell my children, if [we] were to do this over, ‘Go to Canada. Don’t fight a war you can’t win.’”

In the end, it was Joe Hooper who needed to be rescued. From the day he left the service in 1974 with a $12,000 retirement check carried around in his shoe, his war was with himself and the bottle. Not all soldiers, including the many who were transported from the killing fields to home just a few days out of combat, had his agonizing psychological problems. Overwhelmingly, the average war veteran makes it through decompression to live a normal life. But Hooper wasn’t average, nor was his war. (“Vietnam,” says vet and psychologist Jim Goodwin, was uniquely “a private war of survival” by individual soldiers.) Hooper, with two children and a caring wife, was painfully arthritic and 60 percent disabled from his wounds. He sometimes toted around a gun when he boozed. “He drank hard, there’s no denying that,” Hooper’s friend Larry Frank recalled. “But the VA couldn’t deal with him drinking and running around, and that’s exactly what the VA is there for, people with problems like Joe’s.” His binges lasted days, and sometimes he was carried out of Seattle bars by military buddies the way he carried the wounded over his shoulders in Vietnam. “When he’d get on a tear,” remembered Medal of Honor historian Don Ross of Kitsap County, “Bob Bush [another Medal of Honor winner from Olympia] and I would go after him. It was a constant battle.” In between bouts, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) gave him a desk job counseling vets on benefits and then let him go due to “problems adapting to the bureaucratic environment.” In 1979, five years out of his army boots, Joe Hooper was dead from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 40. The VA eventually was reluctantly persuaded to name a wing of its medical center on Beacon Hill after him, and the Army’s reserve center in Bothell now bears his name.

His death was said to be from natural causes. And that’s what scares everyone to this day.

“He was a casualty of war, and you can expect more of the same after Iraq,” says David Willson, a retired Green River Community College librarian, editor of Vietnam War Generation Journal, and a Vietnam vet who worked with Hooper on a collection of war literature. “Look at the history—this is a country made by war on the backs of vets who have never, ever been treated as promised.” Hooper’s story is a lesson on that failure, Willson says. “If we can’t save our heroes, who can we save?”

More Patients, Less Money

For the country’s ex-warriors, many of them aged and ailing and thousands of them homeless, medical and psychological treatment is being rationed at home like meals and bullets sometimes were in battle. Last year, the VA, the second-largest government agency (behind the Defense Department) which operates the nation’s largest hospital system, treated 1.4 million more veterans than in 1996, with 20,000 fewer employees.

Since 1995, its hospital enrollments have shot up from 2.9 million to more than 4.5 million annually. At least another 600,000 of America’s 25 million surviving male and female veterans will enroll this year. Some will have to stand in line, others will be refused, and still others may face new $250 enrollment fees. Though hospital and outpatient care are readily available, outreach programs are being downsized, and a lack of funding will force a quarter-million vets to wait up to 10 months for specialized treatment and surgery. Some clinics and hospitals have shut their doors to new patients, and the VA has just closed enrollment to about 164,000 vets who have no service-connected health complications and rank in the VA’s “highest income” bracket (about $35,000 for a vet with no dependents, for example). More than 450,000 disability claims are pending, and vets who are denied face another long wait for appeals decisions.

The future looks even worse: A House Budget Committee is now proposing to cut VA spending by $15 billion over 10 years, starting with $463 million slashed from next year’s budget. Legislators claim they’re cutting fraud, waste, and abuse. But Joe Fox Sr., head of Paralyzed Veterans of America, who calls the cuts “an in-your-face insult to the veterans of this country,” says the reduction will slam the poorest disabled veterans and cut GI Bill benefits for soldiers who are currently serving in Iraq. The plan could also mean the loss of 9,000 VA physicians in a shorthanded VA system, he says.

For decades, vets say, they’ve watched their benefits fade in tandem with the diminishing national consciousness of their earlier sacrifices. “Pressures on the VA health care system,” warns Joe Violante, legislative director for the Disabled American Veterans, “have escalated to a critical point that can no longer be ignored by our government.” He and others recently told the House Veterans Affairs Committee that the VA is underfunded by almost $2 billion. But, in the midst of a stagnant economy, the proposed Bush tax cut, and the Bush war, where would more money come from? Apparently not from George W. Bush.

A week ago, the president summoned leaders from veterans groups to attend his live-TV speech urging on the troops in Iraq. “People serving in the military are giving their best for this country,” Bush said earnestly, “and we have the responsibility to give them our full support. . . . ” But while the president’s $62.6 billion supplemental funding would provide fuel and supplies for the troops and benefits for the people of Iraq, Bush didn’t mention that his agenda includes a $150 million aid cut to schools attended by military dependents and support for billions in VA reductions.

Is anyone surprised? Slashing the VA budget is almost a presidential ritual. Ronald Reagan, the celluloid warrior, proposed firing 20,000 VA medical personnel and scrapping part of the VA counseling program—in the midst of a suicidal epidemic among Vietnam vets in the 1980s. Even decorated ex-trooper George Bush pared $600 million from the VA and revoked the lousy $237 once given to families to help bury veterans. (Ironically, one of the vets’ best friends was the undrafted Bill Clinton, who increased benefits and pay with the Veterans Programs Enhancement Act of 1998.)

“My father,” says Vietnam vet Willson, “a U.S. Marine, came back from Iwo Jima with spots on his lungs from being buried in the volcanic sand there. He never got diddly out of the VA in compensation. They treated him like shit. He was of that generation where you didn’t push things much and died in his middle 60s from brain tumors. My great-grandfather was a Civil War vet and spent his postwar years battling to get his $15 pension. I fought with the VA for two years over my son, who was born with spina bifida. I made a claim related to Agent Orange, which they denied—only open-spine condition is covered, not the type he has. My Uncle Frank, a Spanish-American War veteran, used to say, ‘I cudgel my cerebellum trying to figure out how Washington is going to screw the veteran next.’”

Past Wars, Future Patients

With the first wars came the first mystery illnesses—the “irritable heart” of the Civil War veterans, later found to be a psychological disturbance not unlike shell shock in WWI, battle fatigue in WWII, and post-traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam. With new ways to fight wars came new ways to die from them—the ever-growing Agent Orange division of medicine. It took 30 years of Vietnam veteran complaints about toxic defoliants ruining their personal and family health and shortening their life spans before the VA accepted the disorders as treatable diseases. More discoveries continue: Only last year did scientists find a new Agent Orange link to a form of leukemia. Desert Storm vets—about 150,000 returned disabled from the “100-hour war”—are the latest to try to prove their many illnesses are related to the effects of chemicals, radiation, and biological weapons. But the VA says evidence does not support claims that depleted uranium and sarin gas, among others, are culpable. (Storm vets are, however, twice as likely as the general population to develop ALS—Lou Gehrig’s Disease—and treatment for that is now covered.)

Other generations of vets are trying to resurrect their own lost causes. In Florida, for example, ex–POW and Medal of Honor winner George Day has taken a class-action benefits lawsuit to the U.S. Supreme Court. The old warhorse calls it “the crusade of my life, and I won’t rest until the last round is fired,” as he seeks to hold the Navy to its 1914 promise that “during your life, you receive free medicine, medical attendance, and hospital service whenever required.” Day contends the Pentagon breached its contract to continue to provide hospital care for military retirees over 65, forcing them to buy Medicare and other supplemental insurance costing thousands of dollars annually—a prohibitive price for many elderly military or surviving spouses. Retired Army Col. David Hackworth, the columnist and frequent guest on TV’s war channels, describes the government’s history of handing out veterans’ benefits as “shameful double-talk, backpedaling, and welshing.” American vets, he says, “from our Civil War to Desert Storm have been consistently treated like orphans.” Hackworth, not unlike Joe Hooper, worries most that troops may be politically sacrificed. Hooper’s friend Willson says, “Joe would be mighty upset by the politics of this war.” Hackworth is. A member of Soldiers for the Truth (www.sftt.org), which includes citizens and congressional members concerned about troop readiness, Hackworth recently told me: “If you’re not a member and inclined to volunteer for SFTT duty, please do. We still need a few more good men and women. It’s only with numbers that we can make the bastards listen.”

Based on his reading of government studies, Hackworth says more than 161,000 Desert Storm vets have been disabled, and almost 10,000 have died from Gulf War–related illness that may have been caused by chemical munitions, oil-fire fumes, untested inoculations, local bugs, or all of the above. Officially, in a January report, the VA said 8,500 direct and indirect combat vets from Desert Storm have since died, but warns in a military voice: “The use of these data to draw conclusions regarding mortality rates will result in inaccurate conclusions.” (There were 148 killed in combat and 467 wounded during Desert Storm.) “Now Bush,” Hackworth wrote in a recent column, “and his war hawks—who almost to a man dodged service in the Vietnam War, just like the majority of our members of Congress—are again sending warriors to employ the military solution in the Gulf at even greater risk, since the Pentagon has just admitted the bio/chem suits our attacking troops will wear are good only for bunker duty.”

Clearly, war casualties aren’t the making of just our enemies. Like U.S. defoliants in Vietnam, the radioactive residue from U.S. munitions fired at Saddam’s tanks are thought to have contributed to cancer and birth defects among Desert Storm vets—U.S. forces used weapons containing 640,000 pounds of depleted uranium during Desert Storm—all in violation of the Geneva accords, according to a United Nations report. Ralph Nader and others are seeking congressional hearings on the likelihood that troops in Iraq today are traveling through a “zone of death” contaminated by the 1991 war. Last month, U.S. and U.K. officials were reassuring the world that there was little threat from depleted uranium weapons today, even though more than 10,000 allied bombs and missiles, some tipped with depleted uranium, have rained down since Operation Iraqi Freedom began. Other earlier Born-in-the-U.S.A. miseries are still being uncovered, some of them intentionally inflicted on our own troops. The Institute of Medicine last month opened a study to determine the possible long-term effects of biological and chemical agents secretly sprayed during the Cold War on 5,000 servicemen aboard U.S. ships. Including sarin and VX nerve gas, the sprayings were intended to test the effects of another chemical used to decontaminate the ships. That chemical, too, was hazardous.

Politicians’ Memories

Many war vets say their complaints aren’t about the working folks at the VA or those who staff their hospitals, as I found out during unauthorized strolls through the Seattle VA medical center a few days back (reporters must have clearance, I was later admonished). “My doctor’s great! And the people here are the sweetest,” said a woman who gave her name as Emma and said she was in the Army during WWII. Others echoed that sentiment. The VA Puget Sound Health Care System, which includes the updated 1950s Seattle hospital on Beacon Hill, American Lake hospital south of Tacoma, and specialty care services to vets in four states, ranks high in the VA system. But it, too, is under pressure from new vets—3,000 more (a total of about 54,000) vets used hospital services here last year than the previous year, and 17,000 new outpatient visits were recorded. “Obviously, we can only work within the parameters of the funding we receive,” says Seattle VA hospital spokesperson Ellen Flores. “But we have a staff that truly cares and an administration dedicated to patient care—the deputy director and chief of staff are veterans themselves.” The state has 670,000 vets, and hospital public affairs director Jeri Rowe says care for some of them is evolving almost daily. “We’ll have more women vets than ever before, and though fewer WWII vets will be here, we’ll have aging Vietnam and Gulf War vets.” The regional system is serving more vets with fewer dollars, she says, “but we’re among the most cost-efficient in the VA system.”

Washington’s congressional delegation, whose districts encompass almost a dozen military bases and 60,000 troops (a third of which are in Iraq), has been sensitive to veterans’ causes, however political their motives may be. Dovish Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Seattle, much maligned by the right for his prewar trip to Iraq, is pushing a bill to study the true effects of depleted uranium. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, criticized by conservatives for voting against the Gulf War II resolution, was subsequently given the American Ex–Prisoners of War’s Barbed Wire Award for her campaign to help vets (she’s the first woman to sit on the Senate Veteran Affairs Committee, and her father was a wounded WWII vet). Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Spokane, who may be planning a run against Murray, recently began handing out medals to survivors of the WWII invasion of Normandy (the medals are made in France, by the way). The eight other state delegates all say they’re fighting for vet rights, too. But why do veterans have to keep reminding us not to forget them?

VA Secretary Anthony J. Principi promises better days, and veterans’ groups are pressuring legislators to vote down Republican funding cuts. The VA and Defense Department are now collecting medical data during fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq that could be used to determine causes of future mystery illnesses. Most everyone hopes a nation that supports its troops in battle won’t forget them again when the smoke clears.

During my visit to the VA hospital, I went looking for Joe Hooper’s plaque, which I had seen unveiled when a wing was named in his honor a dozen years back. “Joe who?” said a man at the information desk. Others were stumped, too. I couldn’t recall the plaque’s exact location and rode elevators and roamed a mile of hallways unsuccessfully. Last week, public affairs director Rowe told me she had found the plaque in the Addictions Services building, but the area was off-limits to me. She wanted me to know that, if the VA system failed Hooper, it learned from those mistakes. “People back then didn’t give much credence to understanding [post-traumatic stress disorder] and addiction as they should have. I think we know a lot more and have moved forward with a greater understanding.” In that sense, you can say Joe Hooper, even if forgotten, continues to help rescue his fellow soldiers. He is buried, by the way, in Arlington National Cemetery. Near the Tomb of the Unknowns.

quote:All the American firms to get Iraqi reconstruction contracts have bankrolled George Bush and the Republican Party or have direct links to USAID, the department of state handing out the Iraqi contracts. All the contracts are being negotiated IN SECRET - in the interests of "national security" - and all the contracts will go to US firms."

So, assuming these "secret contracts" are legit (and your sources for knowledge of "secret" contracts are seriously in question here) who pays for these secret contracts, Mech?

Is it the American Taxpayer?

Or Iraqi oil?

And who benefits from these "secret" contracts? (I assume these companies are performing a legitimate service in building Iraqi infrastructure).. Would you agree with me here?

If Iraqi oil profits are paying to re-build Iraqi infrastructure, I say that's better than the US taxpayer money....wouldn't you agree Mech? (Then of course, you’d need a job or business to pay taxes, so Mech might not have much of a concern in this area).

Again...who is paying for this work? That's not a hypothetical question. I'm really asking because I want an answer from you so we can delve deeper into your theory and line of reasoning.

posted 04-14-2003 08:11 AM
Bull$#!+, MY taxpayer dollars are funding this ILLEGAL, UNJUSTIFIED war for profit. The afforementioned globalist companies will make billions.

Then Bu$h will move his warmongering right into Syria so Israel won't have any "threats" against them anymore, thereby making it safe (for the globalists) to do buisness. Meanwhile Iraq gets a nice Hamid Karzai (or worse) type dictator. A nice pliant puppet of the United States. In fact, I expect torture and detaining of dissidents to start right back up again when the new despot is installed.

They were the reason the United States and Britain were in such a hurry to go to war, the threat the rank-and-file troops feared most.

And yet, after three weeks of war, after the capture of Baghdad and the collapse of the Iraqi government, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction – those weapons that President Bush, on the eve of hostilities, said were a direct threat to the people of the United States – have still to be identified.

The public surrender of a senior Iraqi scientist could yet backfire against the US and Britain. Lieutenant-General Amer Hammoudi al-Saadi, who handed himself over to US forces yesterday, continued to proclaim that Iraq no longer holds any chemical or biological weapons. He should know: the British-educated chemical expert headed the Iraqi delegation at weapons talks with the United Nations.

The few "discoveries" trumpeted in the media – the odd barrel here, a few dozen shells there – have not been on a scale that could reasonably justify the unprovoked military invasion of a sovereign country, and in most cases have been proven to been no more than rumor, or propaganda, or a mixture of the two.

It could still be that, as American forces advance on Tikrit, Saddam's home town, chemical or biological weapons may be discovered, or even deployed by diehard Iraqi troops. But if the casus belli pleaded by George Bush and Tony Blair turns out to be entirely hollow – and it should be stressed that we can't yet know that – what does it say about their motivations for going to war in the first place? How much deception was involved in talking up the Iraqi threat, and how much self-deception?

As Susan Wright, a disarmament expert at the University of Michigan, said last week: "This could be the first war in history that was justified largely by an illusion." Even The Wall Street Journal, one of the administration's biggest cheerleaders, has warned of the "widespread skepticism" the White House can expect if it does not make significant, and undisputed, discoveries of forbidden weapons.

Before the war, American intelligence officials said that they had a list of 14,000 sites where, they suspected, chemical or biological agents had been harbored, as well as the delivery systems to deploy them. A substantial number of those sites have been inspected by the invading troops. Evidence to date of a "grave and gathering" threat: precisely zero.

Much of what has been unearthed points to something we knew about all along: the weapons programs that Iraq ran before the 1991 Gulf War, before sanctions, before regular US and British bombing raids in the no-fly zones and before the UN weapons inspection regime that ran from 1991 to 1998.

US troops have discovered a few suspect barrels here, a sample bottle of nerve agent there, stacks of chemical suits and some drugs typically used to counteract the effects of a chemical attack, such as atropine and 2-pam chloride. According to many military experts, these finds suggest the vestiges of a weapons program that has been dismantled, not one that is up and running. The US government argues that the weapons have been deliberately dispersed and hidden – a claim that would have more merit if there were any evidence of where the materials might have gone.

In his State of the Union address in early February, President Bush was quite specific about the materials he believed Saddam was hiding: 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin and 500 tons of sarin, mustard and nerve gas. These days, he does not mention weapons of mass destruction at all, focusing instead on the liberation of the Iraqi people – as if liberation, not disarmament, had been the project all along.

The administration has shown its embarrassment in other ways. On day two of the war, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, said finding and destroying weapons of mass destruction was the invading force's number two priority after toppling Saddam Hussein – itself a reversal of the argument presented at the UN Security Council.

A week later, Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon spokeswoman, pushed the issue further down the list, behind capturing and evicting "terrorists sheltered in Iraq" and collecting intelligence on "terrorist networks". Now we are told that hunting for weapons is something we can expect once the fighting is over, and that it might go on for months before yielding significant results. "It's hard work," a plaintive Ms Clarke said last week.

Nonsense, say the disarmament experts. "It's clear there wasn't much," said Professor Wright, "otherwise they would have run into something by now. After all, they've taken Baghdad." Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector who spent four months badgering the United States and Britain in vain for reliable intelligence information about the whereabouts of lethal weapons, now says he believes the war was planned on entirely different criteria, well before his inspection teams went back into Iraq in December.

"I think the Americans started the war thinking there were some [weapons]. I think they now believe less in that possibility," he told the Spanish daily El Pais. "You ask yourself a lot of questions when you see the things they did to try to show that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons, like the fake contract with Niger."

Anxious to find a "smoking gun", a team of US disarmament experts has been set up to question Iraqis involved in weapons programs, while others comb sites and analyze samples in the field using mobile labs.

The move has alarmed the weapons inspectors at the UN, where Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, pointedly said last week: "I think they are the ones with the mandate to disarm Iraq, and when the situation permits they should go back to resume their work."

The US team has attempted to lure some of the inspectors, who are recognized as the sole legitimate international authority on Iraq's weapons programs

The latest theory being touted in Washington by the usual unnamed government sources is that the Iraqis have moved their weapons out of the country, very possibly into Syria. This claim appears to have originated with Israeli intelligence – which has every motivation for stirring up trouble for its hostile Arab neighbors– and has been bolstered by reports of fighting between Iraqi Special Republican Guard units and US special forces near the Syrian border.

Disarmament experts do not give the claim much credence. After all, any suspicious convoy or mobile laboratory would almost certainly be spotted by US planes or spy satellites and bombed long before it reached Syria.

But the notion does provide the hawks in Washington with a compelling plot device not unlike the McGuffin factor in Alfred Hitchcock's films – a catalyst that may or may not have significance in itself but that gets the suspense going and keeps the story rolling.

If the Bush administration should ever seek to turn its military wrath on Damascus, the weapons of mass destruction it is failing to find in Iraq might just provide the excuse once again.

Every day since he was secretly spirited into Iraq by the US military just over a week ago, Ahmad Chalabi, the man favoured by the Pentagon to succeed Saddam Hussein, has been holding court with local dignitaries in Nassiriya.

But allegations of financial impropriety linger over Mr Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, the most important of which concern a $200m (£127m) banking scandal in Jordan.

In 1992, Mr Chalabi was tried in his absence and sentenced by a Jordanian court to 22 years' jail on 31 charges of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds and currency speculation.

Mr Chalabi has always maintained the charges were politically motivated. The exact nature of the charges surrounding the collapse of his Petra Bank in Jordan was known only to a few people, but details have now been obtained by the Guardian.

Reports compiled at the time by investigators in London and Jordan, including investigations by the accountants Arthur Andersen, describe how millions of dollars of depositors' money was transferred to other parts of the Chalabi family empire in Switzerland, Lebanon and London, and not repaid.

From relatively modest beginnings when he co-founded Petra Bank in 1977, Mr Chalabi became one of the most powerful and influential businessmen in Jordan. He even acquired the licence from the US to issue Visa cards in Jordan and became well connected in the royal court.

London banking sources say Mr Chalabi's financial empire originally thrived thanks to support from Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan, which enabled Petra to open a string of branches for the first time in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Boast

Petra also acquired a reputation for currency exchange manipulation. The board minutes, subsequently seized by investigators, recorded a boast by Mr Chalabi that there were no problems in circumventing Jordan's restrictive exchange controls.

One London banking source said: "He boasted that there was nothing to worry about. He said he had just transferred $20,000 for the wife of a top member of the [Jordanian] regime so she could buy underwear."

Members of Mr Chalabi's family also ran a gold dealing company, SCF, in London; an investment company, Socofi, in Geneva; and another bank, Mebco, in Geneva and Beirut, as well as a Washington arm, Petra International. The documents record that Mr Chalabi's interests also included companies in Jordan - Al Rimal and Abhara.

By the time of its crash, Petra was the third-largest bank in Jordan, and the poverty stricken Jordanian government was forced to pay out $200m to depositors who would otherwise have lost their savings, and to avert a possible collapse of the country's entire banking system.

Mr Chalabi left the country and subsequently re-emerged living in style in a London apartment off Park Lane.

The trigger for the bank's failure, according to documents seen by the Guardian, was a decision by the central bank governor, Mohammed Said Nabulsi, to enforce regulations on liquidity ratios, and to tighten up on the outflow of foreign exchange from Jordan.

Mr Nabulsi ordered banks to deposit 30% of their foreign exchange holdings with the central bank as part of his efforts to prop up the currency. Petra, apparently alone among the 20 banks asked to make these deposits, was unable to comply.

The central bank then replaced Petra's board of directors and investigations began. Two weeks later, in August 1989, Mr Chalabi left Jordan.

The report by Arthur Andersen subsequently found that the bank's assets had been overstated by $200m. In three main areas, there were huge bad debts (about $80m); "unsupported foreign currency balances at counter-party banks" (about $20m); and money purportedly due to the bank which could not be found (about $60m).

Many of the bank's bad loans were to Chalabi-linked companies. The Swiss and Lebanese firms, Mebco and Socofi, were subsequently put into liquidation too.

A much more detailed 500-page Technical Committee Report was subsequently compiled in Arabic on behalf of the Jordanian military attorney-general, and completed on June 10 1990.

It accused Mr Chalabi of being the man directly responsible for "fictitious deposits and entries to make the income ... appear larger; losses on shares and investments; bad debts ... to Abhara company and Al Rimal company".

The technical report contains 106 "chapters", each dealing with different specific irregularities or irregular activities. In most of these, Mr Chalabi is clearly named as the person on whose authority the irregular transactions were carried out.

As Mr Chalabi was eventually tried in a military state security court, he cannot be extradited, though if he became Iraqi leader he would be unable to visit Jordan.

Mr Chalabi has recently told the press that the late King Hussein of Jordan twice offered him unconditional royal pardons, but he turned them down because he did not believe he had done anything wrong.

Although he has support in the Pentagon, Mr Chalabi is regarded with suspicion by the CIA and the US state department. Last week he announced plans for a meeting of prominent Iraqis in Nassiriya but the state department objected, describing it as Mr Chalabi's "coronation".

The meeting will go ahead tomorrow but under US auspices and probably without Mr Chalabi.

"I will send a representative to this meeting," he said in an interview on Breakfast With Frost on BBC1 yesterday. "There will be no decisions taken."

Media silence

Despite this controversy in Mr Chalabi's past, there has been a marked reluctance to dwell on it in sections of the British media.

The Daily Telegraph, owned by Conrad Black, who has on one of his boards the prominent Pentagon hawk and Chalabi supporter Richard Perle, published a flattering profile of Mr Chalabi last year, characterising him as "the de Gaulle of Iraq". The article did not refer to his conviction or the collapse of Petra Bank at all.

The London Evening Standard last week quoted Mr Chalabi's claim that the bank crash had been caused by intrigue between Saddam and Jordanian officials, and added: "But even the doubters admit his intellect - his knowledge of ... medieval Japanese history is exceptional."

Mr Chalabi could not be contacted for comment yesterday. An aide said he was meeting tribal leaders.

BAGHDAD: Did US intentionally allow Saddam Hussein to flee from Iraq to Syria for a final destination in Russia after a last minute bargain with Moscow to capture the capital of Iraq without fighting? Is the question that thousands of the people in the World are asking as they fail to understand that how come the defences of the Baghdad collapsed within hours.

According to rumours and unconfirmed reports President Saddam Hussein was traveling with the caravan of Russian diplomats that was attacked by the US troops despite the fact that the US had given approval for Saddam’s covert removal from Baghdad in a deal for the surrender of the capital without resistance.

These unconfirmed reports suggest that the deal was reached between the Russian and US governments after talks between US national security advisor Condoleeza Rice and Russian officials just before US attack on Baghdad.

Although, the Saddam government had reportedly asked the military to retreat and do not resist the invaders, some of the troops who did not get the orders in time and the volunteers enraged by the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq resisted the US army till the last breath.

The dynamics of the deal though look surprising but are fairly understandable. Saddam has been a blued eye boy of the US government for many years and his invasion of Kuwait is seen by many as a direct result of the US instigations. In other words, the US used him to create an opportunity to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops in the region.

The much publicized chemical and biological weapons were also provided by the US government to Saddam’s regime for use against Iran. However, his failure to use these weapons against Iraq enraged his mentors and protectors in the West.

The war in Iraq was more than the first expression of the United States' readiness to go to war as an empire. It was also a conceptual experiment that bears profound implications. What the United States learned from this test - as had already been hinted in the smaller war fought in Afghanistan - is that it is the master of the world and can make use of its force almost without interference and without it exacting a true price, neither in casualties nor in economic or strategic assets.

The choice of Iraq was no accident. Iraq was not selected because it posed a strategic threat. Even if it had stocks of chemical weapons, it is hard to view these as a global danger. There are countries that are far more dangerous. The reason Iraq was chosen is that it was relatively weak, because the possibility of getting mired there was small. Hence, it was ideal for a demonstration of the new Clausewitzian concept of war as the continuation of diplomacy.

The Americans went into this war without having concrete support. England is an ally of largely-symbolic significance. The Americans could have got by without the British. The Russians, the European Union and the United Nations were all against the war. It turned out that they were not needed, that their protests were irrelevant, and that their tails were already wagging, instinctively, to greet the victors.

The threats about the awakening strength of the Muslim world also turned out to be empty. The Americans had already discovered this in Afghanistan: You can fight with impunity during the holy month of Ramadan and without a Muslim coalition. There is no "Muslim world." The war of civilizations was decided long ago by Coca-Cola and McDonald's - the John the Baptists of capitalism - and by the savior himself - Microsoft and the Internet.

The American hesitancy was less of a realistic perception than it was a late manifestation of the trauma of Vietnam. Not only the Arab regimes refrained from reacting to the conquest of Baghdad and Karbala, but the supposedly-fanatic Arab masses also stayed home.

The world has a new sheriff who does not hesitate to use his pistol, with or without partners, with or without sanction, with or without justification. The rules have changed. What are the new rules? Well, this question reminds me of the first time I rented a car. I started to look over the leasing contract. "Let me save you the time," the clerk said. "We're always right and you're always wrong."

There is only one country in the world that has not yet fully grasped the implications of the American invasion of Iraq, and that country is Israel. From certain points of view, the invasion worked in Israel's favor. The work of the just is always done by others. Iraq, despite all the bombastic pronouncements by President Bush, is not a strategic threat to the United States or to the free world, but it is definitely a threat to Israel. That threat has been removed, more or less.

However, the invasion of Iraq dramatically lowers Israel's stock as a strategic asset. And not because Israel is not loyal to Uncle Sam; on the contrary, it is a most obedient and faithful vassal.

It's just that Israel is not really needed. Israel's great strategic weight stemmed from its ability to act - or to constitute a potential threat - in a region in which the United States did not want to intervene directly. Israel was a regional mini-power through which it was possible to threaten the Soviet bloc and its satellites, or the Arab world. Israel preserved American interests.

If American involvement becomes direct, there is no further need for mediators. The United States does the dirty work itself. Moreover, as I have argued, American intervention in the Middle East was chosen less for any salient interest (that is, an economic-strategic interest) and more because it is easy to carry out.

In the new world, Arab oil is not insignificant, but its significance is far less than it used to be. From other aspects, the Middle East has mainly nuisance value.

What will be the significance of the structural reduction in Israel's status? It will mean that American readiness to go on paying so as to extricate us from the morass in which we are mired will be diminished. It is unlikely that the United States will exert increasing pressure on Israel in order to achieve durable political solutions. The United States will make do with bad solutions, based on the long-standing American principle of forging poor settlements the consequences of which will be paid by others in the future.

Donald Rumsfeld has no inclination to give prizes to Arafat and his successors. He even likes Ariel Sharon. But the whole thing is starting to cost too much money. American support will be reduced. The economic crisis will deepen. Israeli democracy will continue to be eroded. It won't take much for Israel to become just another Third World country that solicits help from those willing to be generous.

What conclusion should Israel draw from the war? That it should hurry on its own to achieve a good settlement that will make it possible to rehabilitate the economy and start rehabilitating the society and the state of democracy in the country. In the new world, Israel's major asset is not military might but genuine membership in the club of the advanced countries.